Design and Test of a Capsule Type Endoscope Robot with Novel Locomation Principle

Robots become more and more widely used in medical application especially in minimally invasive surgery (MIS) these years, and endoscope robot is a typical example. There is sill not a kind of conventional endoscope which can reach the whole gastrointestinal (GI) tract. And conventional endoscopes generate pain and discomfort to patients due to the stiffness of their body. Such disadvantages do not exist in endoscope robots. However, the soft and elastic characters of GI tract make the locomotion efficiency of endoscope robot very low. To resolve this problem, it is necessary to find a special locomotion principle which fit the GI tract, and many researchers have paid a lot of effort. In this paper, a novel locomotion principle is proposed, which is the first time used in the endoscope robot. The locomotion principle is obtained by analyzing, simulating and simplifying the movement of mucus-cilia system. To evaluate its performance, a prototype of the endoscope robot adopting this locomotion principle is developed, which is driven by shape memory alloy (SMA) actuator. An in-vitro experiment shows that the robot can move successfully with efficiency about 27%. The result of experiment validates that the proposed locomotion principle fit the GI tract. And some suggestions to enhance the locomotion efficiency are proposed